The purpose

This paper reports on Australian research within a broader globalising context around one of the most persistent and protracted problems facing governments today – rising youth unemployment. The research traces the experience of thirty-two high school students over eighteen months in the years 2011-2013. The purpose of the study was to listen to young people’s stories with a view to better understanding the barriers and obstacles to ‘getting a job’ and from their vantage point, identify the educational policy and practice context that needs to be created and more widely sustained to assist their career aspirations and life chances.

Underpinning the research is a deep-rooted belief that complex social problems can only be properly comprehended by listening to the voices of young people as key informants about their world (Smyth & Hattam, 2001). Kozol (2005) puts it well when he says, ‘Students were the best data source, pure witness and more reliable in telling the truth of the schools than the others’ (p. 12). The irony is that whilst young people are compelled to stay at school until 17 years of age, we know relatively little about their lives or what works best for them (Smyth & McInerney, 2012).

The problem

Young people face a precarious labour market as the forces of globalisation, technology and free market policies destroy jobs faster than they can be created (Aronowitz & DiFazio, 2010). Despite evidence to the contrary young people are told that education is a panacea for ‘getting a job’. Whilst it certainly helps, the power of schooling to fix social and economic problems such as unemployment is illusionary for growing numbers of young people globally (Grubb & Lazerson, 2004; Standing, 2011). The promise of the knowledge economy to create more high-skilled, high wage jobs, for so long the cornerstone of developed economies (and education systems) has been undermined by the ‘global auction for cut-priced brainpower’ as workers from the emerging economies such as China, India, Russia, and Eastern Europe compete for a diminishing number of decent, well-paid middle class jobs (Brown, Lauder & Ashton, 2001, p. 5).

In response, most western governments including Australia have pursued a convergence of policy around a dominant version of vocationalism (Malley & Keating, 2004; OECD, 1994). Grubb and Lazerson (2004) refer to this ‘Education Gospel’ as ‘a set of educational practices … whose purposes are dominated by preparation for economic roles … responsive to external demands – in this case, to demands for the “essential skills employers want” (Carnevale, 1990) and the “skills of the twenty-first century”’(p. 3).

In this context, it is a relatively short step to blame young people who can’t find a job because of personal deficits (e.g., lazy, low aspirations, troublesome, ‘at risk’, families, lack of motivation etc) (Valencia, 2010). Drawing on Mills’ (1970) distinction between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’ we endeavour to shift the focus from the individual to consider the broader structural and institutional arrangements of society in particular the collapse of job opportunities and the cumulative effects of social and economic disadvantage (Mills, 1970, p. 15).

Key questions

In pursuing this line of inquiry the research addresses a number of key questions, like:

• How do young people themselves talk about ‘getting a job’?
• How do young people’s aspirations for the future mirror the realities of school life and the global labor market?
• What social and economic conditions limit possibilities and opportunitiesfor young people?
• How can public institutions and communities work creatively with young people to improve the quality of life for youth? (Down & Smyth, 2012, pp. 7-8).

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